A Conversation with Bennett Solnick, M.D.

We published psychiatrist and writer Bennett Solnick’s “House Calls” last November, an essay about the many-headed tolls of the pandemic. Meetinghouse editor Sophie Huang got back in touch with Solnick as we enter into this socially and scientifically “new” moment. So what now? How should we keep creating now that we’re entering into the swing of things again? And why did we waste so much time sitting at our desks?

Sophie Huang: How are you doing?

Bennett Solnick: Thanks for asking! Much better. In “House Calls," I reported that “the free flow of my attention changed.” That sums up a lot about the last sixteen months for me. I’ve been very focused on existential threats to humankind for a long time, and on emerging infectious diseases in particular. Suddenly, unexpectedly, that thing I am habitually anticipating convulsed the planet. I was swept into it, as were we all. My work, too, became one with the pandemic, as I describe in the piece. Intellectually, personally and professionally, it’s as if my life became about one thing only. Now that we are moving into a new phase, life has expanded again for me. This is so welcome!

SH: Did writing “House Calls” help you or change the way you think about the pandemic?

BS: I like the idea that I write to know what I think. I had an idea about the pandemic and my experience of it before I started writing. But I understood that idea with more depth and specificity after writing the piece. That’s the way you hope it works.

SH: You wrote “House Calls” last May, when we were two months into dealing with the Covid outbreak here in the US. Here we are a year later, and life is just starting to return to normal. How have your thoughts on the pandemic changed since then?

BS: Can I answer this way? There are many perspectives on the pandemic that were unconnected to the story told in “House Calls.” Joshua Lederberg, the microbiologist and Nobelist famously said, “The single biggest threat to man's continued dominance on the planet is the virus.” This idea hovers portentously when considering emerging viral illnesses. One of the most important things I take away from Covid-19 is how fortunate we were that it was not more deadly. The pandemic killed some low single digit percentage of patients, but there’s no reason ex ante to have expected that it wouldn’t kill the 10% that SARS killed. Or the some 25% for MERS. Or 99%, a civilization-ending event. Or that the deaths would be concentrated in the old, unlike the 1918 influenza pandemic which preferentially killed young people in the prime of life. We may not be so fortunate next time. We should prepare.

Second, maybe it’s not surprising that the pandemic was so politicized in the US. That our society is politically riven is a core feature of the moment. Yet this is deeply disappointing and concerning. I don’t have the answer, but as a society we need to do a better job of responding to medical and scientific realities.

SH: In “House Calls,” you write about your psychiatric practice and the pandemic. How does your work as a psychiatrist fit into your writing?

BS: First, let me say that I can’t really answer this because I don’t know. I’m thinking of a comment by Alan Watts to the effect of “Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth.” My experiences as a psychiatrist mesh together somehow with everything else that interests me. What often emerges from that in my writing is more of an attitude and a perspective, rather than something directly about my psychiatric work. For example, I’m keenly aware of the power of interpretation to organize our experiences. I’m interested in the way the narratives we elaborate contribute to our perception of reality. I’m grateful for the way my psychological work has deepened my perspective on human subjectivity. That said, and I mean this with some humor, I was interested in these ideas prior to psychiatry, and through that work they assume new forms and guises.

SH: What does your creative process look like? What inspires you to write?

BS: Over time, I’ve written short stories, a novel, essays, and poetry. I intend to write in those forms in the future. But I’ve confronted a problem for many years, and I only recently found a better approach. I am not one of those people who can write a thousand words a day before or after work and in a year and a half - voila! - a novel. My work life is busy, and I am more productive with manageable projects that I can complete in a finite period. For the last few years, I’ve focused on making videos. I have a YouTube channel called Shouting From the Rooftops. My videos are organized around all the things that fascinate me. This is the motivating concept: to share the many things that amaze me, that inspire my sense of curiosity, fascination, awe, and wonder. Emerging infectious diseases, but also human evolution, Earth history, astronomy, origins of life...Creating scripts has become a primary outlet for my writing, but I’ve loved learning to film and edit and to work with the related technologies. Most importantly, this works for me!

I also write reviews of most books I read. I spend a good bit of time on an annual “Favorite Reads of the Year” email that goes out to friends, family and interested parties examining the ten or so books I most enjoyed.

SH: Do you have any writing rituals?

BS: Yes, one. If I am not in the mood to write, I ask myself to sit and write for a few minutes only. If I’m still not interested after that, I can stop. But that gives me a fighting chance to get engaged in the process.

SH: Which three books or writers have influenced you the most, and how?

BS: So that’s tricky question, because I’ve read so many wonderful books and writers as an adult. But my feeling is that no reading experience is as mesmerizing and as transporting as being a 13-year-old kid immersed in Lord of the Rings or Dune for the first time. The fresh clay of a young mind is more readily influenced, so the most influential writers and books for me weren’t necessarily the best ones, but rather the ones that captured and thrilled me at that receptive time. Asimov, Vonnegut, Aldous Huxley for three. Then again, Sartre and Camus threw me into a full-blown existential crisis as a teenager. That’s influential! Jude the Obscure gutted me. Be careful with that one.

SH: What projects are you working on now or do you have planned?

BS: As I scale down my practice in the coming years, I hope to take on projects that require more time than I have available now. A novel. Also, a book based on the themes of my YouTube channel? Quite possibly.

SH: Do you have any advice for young writers or for people who are trying to fit a creative practice into their lives?

BS: I can only report what I’ve been through myself. It’s so easy to put aside your creative impulse in the quotidian business of the workweek. If you have the interest and the ability to do extended creative work, that’s fantastic. But if you struggle as I have with how to get that to happen, consider what conditions will best enable you to thrive. For me, it was shorter projects that could be completed in a finite time. That has meant videos, poems, essays, reviews. It may be something else for others.

SH: If you could have a conversation with your pre-pandemic self, what would you say?

BS: Get a standing desk!